by M. E. Parker
She lifted off of Rounder and the drudgers helped him to his feet, handing him the flail. Megan blindfolded him again, and the drums played a slow beat in rhythm with Rounder’s spin.
“Don’t do it, Rounder!” Myron shouted. “Don’t kill them.”
“Myron, what are you doing?” Sindra whispered.
“Who said that?” Megan whipped up her hand, and the drums halted midbeat.
“Thieves die in my town. Maybe you should join them.”
“Let them go.” Myron waited for inspiration, for anything to say that wouldn’t dribble from his mouth like ooze from a leaky grease gun. “Back—back to Jonesbridge—where they’ll tell everyone of your power.”
Megan nodded, striding across the bandstand. “What a delicious idea.” She sent her drudgers to retrieve Myron. “But one survivor is all it takes to tell the tale.”
“One might not make it back to Jonesbridge by himself.” The drudgers shoved Myron onto the bandstand. Rounder shook his head, overt enough for Myron to understand he’d made a big mistake in opening his mouth.
“Look at you.” Megan slinked up to Myron. “Tall. Strong. You just might be my next…special drudger—now that Jasper has ruined his chance.”
“I d—” Megan cut Myron off midsentence with a kiss. She pressed her breasts against his chest. Her lips moved with his. Her tongue entered his mouth. His legs tingled all the way to his groin as he swayed into Megan, forgetting for the moment where he was and what had happened.
Then Megan pulled away without warning and spun to the crowd. “I’ll make you a deal. What’s your name?”
“My—my name?”
“Your name?”
“Myron.”
“Okay, Myron. I’ll make you a deal.” She placed the flail in his hand. “I will release two of these worthless tate sniffers—to warn any others that might follow. My good nature knows no bounds.” The crowd cheered. “If you play piñata with…” She strolled down the line of her captives hanging by their feet over the stage. “This one.” She slapped the belly of the orange shirt on the far left. His eyes grew wide. He shook his head. Myron could hear him pleading through the gag.
“Why kill any of them?”
“Why?” She turned to the crowd. “Why kill thieves?, he asks.” She gestured with both hands for the crowd to respond. “That’s right.” Megan pressed up against Myron, bringing her lips a breath away from his, leaving panging Myron with guilt for hoping she would kiss him again, tempted to initiate it himself. Megan instead poked him in the nose. “Because we don’t like them.” She strolled back to watch the spectacle at a safe distance from blood splatter. “One for two. Now get going.”
Seeing the orange uniforms of the Civility Administration—ghosts, cockrels, whatever name they took—in their current state, vulnerable and squirming, reminded Myron that they’d killed his mother, enslaved him, treated Sindra like carnal property, and done everything in their power to destroy any dreams that germinated. Myron gripped the flail and swung it around over his head.
“Don’t do it, Myron!” Sindra yelled. “Myron!”
“Sindra.” Myron lowered the flail.
“Oh, this just gets keeps getting better.” Megan rolled her eyes. “My, my, the choice just got harder, Myron.”
In the corner of his eye, Myron caught Rounder mouthing something. Still in a kneeling position, Rounder held his hand to his mouth as if eating and mouthed the word enough times for Myron to understand—doughnut.
“In order to save the carpie you just bought in my auction…” Megan winked at the crowd. “Something tells me they already know each other.” A few in the front row laughed nervously. “You will piñata all three thieves. Once you have done that, Rounder won’t have to piñata the girl.”
“Run, Sindra. Run.”
Rounder mouthed doughnut again just to make sure Myron understood, and jumped to his feet in the chaos of drudgers who ran for Sindra. Chained together, Sindra and Nico made a coordinated dash into the dark market as though they had run in chains together before.
“Someone is going to play piñata.” Megan pointed at two more drudgers who gave chase into the market.
Rounder ran for the wall to the left of the bandstand and slipped through a crack. Myron followed. As he reached the spot where Rounder had disappeared into the rubble of the Old Age building behind them, a blast sounded from above. Pain shot down Myron’s back as the shrapnel from a drudger popcap grazed him in the back. Most of the debris hit the wall, but a large shard of glass wedged into Myron’s shoulder blade.
A popcap exploded again and three people near the stage dropped, moaning, blood seeping from jagged wounds where the shrapnel tore holes in their bodies. “Doughnuts,” Myron whispered. He squeezed through a crack in the Old Age building behind the bandstand, the glass in his back edging farther into his muscle, as he tried to recall where Rounder’s aunt sold doughnuts. The market resembled a maze with more twists and turns than the Jonesbridge factory drainage canals.
With the bulbs in the market darkened, slits of moonlight ripped through seams in the fabric overhead. Myron trailed the fleeing shadow ahead of him, hoping it was Rounder. Noises from the town center echoed with shouts and cursing, pledges to dice into a thousand pieces everyone involved in the disruptions.
When he’d grown confident he could hide in the shadows, every light in the market illuminated at once, making it resemble daytime in the middle of the night. Myron froze. Ahead, Rounder darted around a corner.
Alone in the alley, Myron scanned the closed stalls in search of a place to hide.
“Psst,” a voice whispered.
Myron turned to see an elderly Gapi man gesturing from a small opening between the crumbling walls of two Old Age buildings. The man grabbed Myron’s arm and tugged him into a recess through a fabric curtain that separated a clothing merchant and a pipe vendor.
Muffled footsteps and voices sounded from the alleyway. The man panicked, motioning for Myron to get down. He dug out an iron rod with a hexagonal tip on one end and fitted it into a receptacle jutting from the Old Age wall. He bent the rod where it hinged in the center and cranked. A chain ticked from inside the wall, while gears churned beneath. The giant loom where the weaver fashioned cloth rose to reveal a rusted iron disc emblazoned with the words SEWER ACCESS.
“Baj paqua,” the man whispered. He pointed to the manhole cover and used the same iron rod to pry the lid open. A waft of smoke rose from under the lid. “Baj.” He cocked his head toward the opening.
Myron glared down the hole. Once inside, he grasped the ladder and climbed down. The lid closed the circle of light above him. He heard the sound of the gears and chain lowering the loom that concealed the manhole. Myron prepared for darkness and uncertainty as he reached the bottom. Instead, he saw candlelight flickering and people gathered at an intersection of three tunnels.
In one tunnel, Myron found a handful of Gapi men huddled around a game of chance where they rolled a small wooden ball around a wheel and placed bets to see where the ball would stop. It looked more complicated than nub, the game slogs played for rations in the swill pen, which required no special equipment. This game used a wheel with symbols on the edge, holding the players breathless as the ball popped and rolled until it slid into a recess in the wheel, when a mishmash of cheering and cursing erupted, just short of a fight, as the winners collected their takes.
“How did I not know about this place?”
Myron jumped when he heard Rounder’s voice. He turned to see Rounder following his aunt down the main tunnel.
“You were a drudger,” his Aunt Ktala said. She placed a smoldering pipe between her lips and puffed, holding the smoke in her lungs for a moment before releasing it with a breath that smelled of burning rubber. “One way in, two ways out, and Megan doesn’t know about it.” Ktala clapped once. “Maybe it’s not her town after all.”
“Rounder.” Myron ran up beside them and spotted Sindra. Their eyes met, Sindra looki
ng over Nico’s shoulder. Sindra ran for Myron, pushing Nico backward causing them both to stumble.
“Got to get rid of these crazy chains.” Rounder slapped at the chains that tethered Sindra to her mysterious young husband in fourteen places. “All this clanking metal makes too much noise.” He pointed to the shackle cuffs around Myron’s ankles where four lengths of the cut chain dangled.
“Come on.” Aunt Ktala nodded for them to follow her down the tunnel to a collection of people huddled around candles mending ripped clothing.
Ktala spoke to another old woman, who left and then returned with a ring of keys containing every shape, size, and type of key Myron could imagine. Some rusted, some shiny, some fashioned from Old Age alloys, she tried one after another on Myron’s shackle cuff, working the keys in and out, jiggling, until the lock clicked and the cuff fell away.
“This one.” She tossed Myron’s shackle onto a pile of scrap metals. “Came from Jonesbridge. I know those well.” When she spotted the glass in Myron’s back, she placed a rag around the wound and slipped the glass from his flesh, pointing to Ktala to hold the cloth to stop the bleeding.
She lifted the chains between Sindra and Nico. “These are—strange. Haven’t seen this type of mechanism before.” She studied her keys, eyeing the shapes and examining the locks “Who put this on you?”
“Dromon coupled us up like this. In Orkin’s Landing.”
“Orkin’s Landing?” Aunt Ktala took a sudden interest. “The ocean conclave?”
“Ocean everywhere.”
“You saw the ocean?” Myron held the cloth on his back and sat beside Sindra while the locksmith worked her picks on Sindra’s chain. “It’s real?”
“Yeah, it’s real. Water spilling over the horizon.”
“Why did they chain you like this?” Rounder sat beside them working out how the crisscrossed chains that bound them together worked.
“It’s a unity binding,” Sindra said, never looking Myron in the eyes.
“What they do to married couples that won’t consummate their union.” Nico spat out the explanation with frustration.
“It’s his fault we wound up like this. All he had to do was lie.” Sindra squeezed Myron’s hand.
“My fault? Carlisle couldn’t even break us out of this. Wouldn’t’ve mattered if I lied or not.” Nico looked to the roof of the tunnel as if to stare through the arch of Old Age bricks above him. “Besides, you can’t lie to the Great Above. He’s the only one that can get us out of this thing.”
“Me and Sindra had plans on joining,” Myron said.
“Too late for that. We’re joined in the eyes of Judas. That’s forever,” Nico said.
“I can’t figure this lock.” The woman clicked her tongue. “Strange. Forged stainless alloy. Good luck cutting it off, either. You kids might be stuck together for a good while.”
Sindra groaned.
“The only way to get out of the binding is to…well, you know…make our marriage official with sexing.”
“Right. And how’s that going to get these chains off?”
“I don’t know. That’s what Dromon said.”
“Dromon? You’re too smart of a kid—”
“Why did you marry this kid?” Myron gave Nico a shove on the shoulder.
“You think I had a choice?”
“You had a choice.” Nico nodded.
“Did you?” Myron pulled Sindra’s face toward his so that their eyes met.
Sindra closed her eyes. “They stole my baby, Myron.”
Chapter Eleven
Sindra awoke to the sight of Nico’s face, his mouth gaping, his tongue like a slab of salted pork strap. Her own head rested on Myron’s shoulder. His arms embraced her through the unity chains. She could no longer distinguish her own odor from Nico’s or which one of them piqued the nose more, but Myron’s smell brought her back to Jonesbridge, to a time when they dreamed together, planned their escape, and saw the world for the first time with promise instead of hopelessness.
Sindra shoved Nico, the same way she’d woken him up for the past five days, though sleep in the unity binding only came in fits of waking dreams. She moved Myron’s arms to keep them from getting pinched by the chains. A fourth face, sucking the breath from the crowded jumble of people, the locksmith, studied the locking mechanism on Sindra’s neck. From the looks of her eyes, red and watery, Sindra imagined that the old lady hadn’t yet fallen asleep for the night.
“I don’t think I can take this much longer.” Sindra studied the folds in the old woman’s face and wondered what it must be like to live so long at a time when Sindra feared she and Nico would spend the rest of their short lives breathing the same stale air.
Along the areas where the cuffs rubbed against her skin, red swollen patches filled with pus reminded her of the time she watched over Myron in the bunker as he slept with fever and nightmares and a bullet in his leg. Lalana’s words haunted her then. “Specs too small to see can kill a man as sure as any piss whistle,” she’d claimed. Lalana’s warning resurfaced as Sindra noticed the same raw skin on Nico.
Ktala stood over them, next to Rounder. “I don’t know anyone in the market that can take that off.”
Myron’s eyes opened. “There has to be a way.”
“There is. Only one person I can think that has a chance at taking that thing off.” Rounder pointed upward. “Ren.”
“Ren?” Ktala squinted as if to study a reel of faces in her mind.
“Megan’s concubine—mastermind behind all of her torture contraptions.” Rounder bowed his head. “She’s an expert contraptionist—with metals, gears, even electricity.”
“Let’s go. Where do we find her?” Myron untangled his arms from the chains.
“Whoa—you three cost me everything, the whole barrel of bolts, all I’ve collected the past few months. You spent my life savings buying these two chained-together rack warts, and now I got nothing. Nothing.”
“I’m sorry, Rounder.” Myron took Sindra’s hands. Nico’s followed. “Lalana took a bullet for me—so that I could find Sindra. Her life, Sindra’s life, everyone is worth more than a wagon full of junk.”
“Junk? You’re going to learn the hard way out here that wagons full of junk are the only way you survive in the Nethers.”
Ktala placed her hands on Rounder’s shoulders and turned him toward her. “I’ve known you since you were a baby, Jasper.”
“Rounder. It’s Rounder.”
“Fine. Rounder it is. Makes no difference what I call you.” She pointed a finger to his chest. “It’s what’s in here that matters. And you can help these poor kids.”
“You were there last night. You saw Megan. That piñata bit might be the most humane thing I’ve seen her do in a while.” He belted out a nervous laugh, waving toward the village above them. “She’s a merchant through and through. A trader. And she don’t take the short end of any deal. Whether or not Ren can even get them apart, Megan’s gonna want something in return. Something big. And I ain’t got nothing left to give her.”
“I’d give her one of my body motors if she could get us apart.” Sindra wasn’t certain which of the essential body motors a person had two of or could live without, but rich people paid big money to eat such things as a delicacy. “Heart, liver, lungs, kidney—cut it out and take it, just get me the Chasm out of this thing.”
“You need all those motors, dear,” Ktala said. “Well—’cept lung and kidney. Got more than one of those.”
“Besides, no one’s paying to eat a slog motor. And she’d kill you getting it out.”
“Okay, then what?” Sindra looked to Myron, hoping for an idea to pop out of his mouth.
“Megan likes you, Rounder. You were her drudger.”
“So?”
“So…maybe you could offer to work for her ag—”
“No. No. No.”
“Please take us to Ren.” The whites of Nico’s half-open eyes were the color of blood.
“Megan’s
drudgers are already looking for us after last night. And she sleeps during the day. And I ain’t about to wake her.”
“Please, Rounder. We’re salvagers. We can help you replace what I spent to get Sindra.” Myron helped Sindra and Nico to their feet. “We can go without you. We don’t have to have your help.”
Ktala spoke up before Rounder could respond. “Yes, you do. No one knows where Megan sleeps. No one else can get through her drudgers. And—without Rounder, she might just kill you for the fun of it.”
Though Sindra had known Rounder for only a few hours, most of which she’d spent asleep, she was grateful that he had at least befriended Myron and that he’d had a wagon full of junk for Myron to spend on her. But those two girls, the twins—they were the ones who’d sacrificed for her, who’d given up their freedom, going willingly into slavery so that Myron could win the auction. If she and Nico were going to die anyway, how guilty she would feel in her last moments, making all of Myron’s efforts pointless. “We have to try, Rounder. I’ll go out there and raise the Chasm until I see her if I have to.”
Rounder rubbed his face and cursed in Gapi under his breath, to the disapproval of his Aunt Ktala. “I will take you to Ren. I won’t talk to Megan. I won’t work for Megan. I won’t kill for Megan. Is that clear?”
“Okay.” Myron nodded. “Thanks, Rounder.”
“Okay? That’s what you said when I told you we were coming down here for one doughnut. In and out, I said. I want more than okay.”
“We’ll make our own deals. We promise,” Sindra said.
Rounder cut a circle through the air with his index finger. The old woman locksmith and Ktala walked over to an alcove and pulled a rectangular box from the wall. The size of a shoe, the box had an earpiece on one end and, on the other, a cable that ran into a small hole in the wall. “Sube,” Ktala said into the receiver.
Rounder nodded in the direction of the ladder. Myron fell in behind him, and Sindra and Nico performed their travel ritual, which required Sindra to put aside her contempt for her familiarity of Nico and cooperate in lockstep, twins in an exposed womb made of chains, and now, they faced the ladder again, this time up instead of down.
